Discourses of the good early childhood educator in professional training: Reproducing marginality or working toward social change

In Ontario, a significant number of women care for and educate young children in early childhood education settings. This workforce is characterized as marginalized and part of a secondary labour market. The workers who receive professional training are subject to pedagogical discourses of the good early childhood educator (ECE). This dissertation employs a critical and feminist standpoint theoretical framework to analyze these discourses and to explain how they produce and prepare the female ECE graduate to work in a stratified gendered, educational labour market. Using qualitative methods, discourses of the good ECE were located in triangulated data-sources that make up the key components of a college training program: a selection of textbooks from 1971 to 2003; interviews with ECE instructors; and student assignments collected over a two-year period.; The study found that discourses of the good ECE contribute to the formation of an ideological category of female worker who serves the state's modernist project. Several features of the discourses work in conjunction to reproduce a particular ECE identity and a marginalized social position. First, the discourses limit the range of ECE qualities to those deemed feminine and devalued. Second, the discourses are operationalized in an individual adult-child relationship in which the female adult is considered marginally social, active and competent in contrast to the child's central social activities and competencies. Third, the discourses produce an ECE graduate from a minority racial and ethnic background who is further marginalized upon entry into the workforce because she is viewed as less competent in acquiring good ECE discourses. Finally, the discourses require the ECE graduate to intensify her caring responsibilities and commitment in spite of poor working conditions.; Graduates then draw upon pedagogical discourses to construct a professional identity that historically has been a barrier to any shift in their own and others' perceptions of ECE and women's work. The dissertation concludes by presenting alternative pedagogical discourses that take into account the real and everyday experiences of working with young children. These discourses can potentially initiate changes in ECE identity formation, social relations and arrangements within a marginalized occupation.